Tag: Publishing

In my day job as a marketer, I sometimes come across things that make me think marketing and book publishing aren’t so different. That happened recently while I was listening to the Future Commerce podcast, which had as their guest Rory Sutherland, the chairman of Ogilvy, one of the marque branding, advertising, and PR agencies.

He talked about the fragmentation of market segments into lots of smaller artisan brands. That sounds a lot like the rise of indie publishers and self-publishing.

He talked about brands co-creating products and content with their customers. That sounds like what happens in some author communities, on Substack with some serialized stories that are driven by reader feedback, and with some Kickstarter campaigns with tiers that bring funders into the story.

And he talked about how marketing is fat-tailed, saying, “10% of what you do delivers 130% of the value, but you don’t know what the 10% is in advance.” Now that sounds an awful lot like publishing—except the 10% figure is too high. We know from the Penguin Random House antitrust trial that just 4% of book titles account for the majority of publishing profits.

It’s an understatement to say there’s a fair amount of chance involved in success and, just as in R&D, you learn from your failures. Just today I was reading an interview in Agents and Books with Lindsay King-Miller, the author of This Is My Body, The Z Word, and Ask a Queer Chick, and she said, “Just because my first book didn’t launch my career like I hoped doesn’t mean it was a waste of time. … I made friends and connections and developed skills that I still use.”

I found that inspiring, and I hope any other inspiring novelists reading this do, too. I’m prepared to roll the dice a few times and see if I get lucky. I’m also prepared to learn from my mistakes and keep going. Whatever your dreams are, I hope you’re prepared to roll the dice and take some chances on yourself, too.

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David Brooks’ New York Times article When Novels Mattered (link to gift article) is the latest salvo against the declining relevance of fiction, and in particular literary fiction. He blames this decline on the popularity of genre fiction, the rise of the internet, M.F.A. programs, and ultimately (and predictably) on liberal politics. My two cents is that only one of those events had a significant impact on shaping the current literary marketplace.

The Internet-Driven Collapse of the Monoculture

In the mid- to late 20th century that Brooks idealizes, media was tightly controlled by a relatively small number of institutional players. And then came the internet. Web 1.0 shook the monoculture, but Web 2.0 destroyed it.

Streaming completely undid TV, which also competes with YouTube and TikTok. What remains of radio competes with streaming services and podcasts. News organizations compete with individuals and corporations and social media at large—a transition I have witnessed and experienced first hand as a journalist, then blogger, and then brand journalist and content marketer. And, of course, traditional book publishers now compete with self-publishing—another anti-establishment trend I have happily participated in. Because of their tremendous costs, movies are the last bastion of monoculture (which is why we’re seeing yet another Superman).

The consequence of all this new competition is that there are far fewer mega-hits in every medium, not just in books. At the same time, our culture is much richer and much more representative than it was 40 years ago. The democratization of media has been a wonderful thing. The pie is not only bigger, but way more people have gotten a slice of it. That’s good for creators and even better for consumers.

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